top of page
logo
Sign Petition

Paducah Is Not Alone - 69 Communities Have Said No. Here's Why.

  • Writer: ProtectMcCrackenCounty
    ProtectMcCrackenCounty
  • May 7
  • 9 min read

From Maine to Idaho to Georgia, communities across America are pushing back against the AI data center land grab. The reasons are the same everywhere. The politics don't matter. The math does.


If you've been following local coverage of GLE and the proposed data center and nuclear reactor in McCracken County, you might have gotten the impression that opposition to these projects is a local eccentricity — a small group of residents who don't understand economic development, standing in the way of progress.

That impression is wrong.


What is happening in Paducah is happening — right now, simultaneously — in communities across America. From rural Idaho to suburban Georgia to New England fishing communities. In counties that voted for Trump and counties that voted for Biden. In states with Democratic governors and states with Republican legislatures.

69 jurisdictions have active moratoriums on data center development as of May 2026. Up from 8 just one year ago. Four of those moratoriums are permanent. From March to April 2026 alone — a single month — 14 new restrictions were enacted.


This is not a fringe movement. It is a national reckoning. And understanding why it is happening everywhere else helps explain exactly what is happening here.


The reasons are the same everywhere


Across every state, every county, every city that has enacted restrictions on data center development, four arguments recur so consistently that they have become the defining framework of the national debate.


1. Water


A single hyperscale data center can consume 3 to 5 million gallons of water per day. In Minnesota, just 13 proposed facilities would demand the same electricity it takes to power all 2.3 million homes in the state. In Texas, data centers are projected to use 49 billion gallons of water in 2025 — rising to 399 billion gallons by 2030.


Communities that have spent decades managing water resources, protecting aquifers, and maintaining river quality are being asked to absorb industrial water demands that dwarf anything they have ever hosted — often with no study of what that means for the people who depend on those water sources.


McCracken County sits on the Ohio River — the drinking water source for five million people downstream. The proposed data center would add industrial cooling discharge to a watershed already carrying contamination from 61 years of federal uranium enrichment. The water argument in Paducah is not abstract. It is the Ohio River. It is what people downstream drink.


2. Electricity costs


In Virginia — the world's leading data center state — data centers now consume approximately 40% of the state's electricity. Residential electricity prices have increased by up to 267% near data center clusters over five years. Virginia's own Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission projected that data centers could drive up residential electricity bills by $444 per year by 2040.


In Georgia, electric customers absorbed six rate increases in under two years as data center demand strained the grid. In New York, 70% of locations with year-on-year electricity price increases were within 50 miles of significant data center activity.

The proposed SMR in McCracken County is designed to power the data center — which appears to remove this argument from the Paducah equation. But it raises a different question: what happens when the SMR goes offline for maintenance, refueling, or an incident? What grid backup is required, who pays for it, and what happens to local electricity rates if that backup is activated at scale? None of those questions have been publicly answered.


3. Tax subsidies that don't add up


Nationally, state and local governments are beginning to realize that data center tax incentives — designed decades ago for smaller facilities — have exploded in cost while producing far fewer jobs than promised.


Virginia loses $928 million per year in combined state and local tax revenue to data center exemptions. Georgia's data center tax exemptions jumped from $10 million in 2020 to $625 million in 2025 — a 6,150% increase in five years. Illinois is losing $370 million per year — the equivalent of what the federal government redistributed to that state's 1,200 smallest communities during the pandemic.


In McCracken County, GLE's total incentive package is $98.9 million — for 240 permanent jobs over 15 years. That is $412,000 in confirmed public incentives per permanent job. And that's before the undisclosed NDA commitment is added.


The national data center industry is learning what the coal and auto industries taught us decades ago: a company's capital investment in a facility is not the same thing as community benefit. The math has to be done on what the community actually receives — net of all incentives, exemptions, and obligations. When that math is done honestly, it rarely looks as good as the headline figures suggest.


4. Process — the secrecy and speed of it


Perhaps more than any other single factor, what has turned communities against data center development is not the facilities themselves but the way they arrive — fast, large, and without meaningful public input.


A Harvard researcher advising Maine's legislature described it as the "speed, scale and secrecy" of developer timelines. Projects fall out of the sky, permits are applied for before communities know what's coming, and by the time the public is aware, the economic development apparatus has already made commitments that are politically difficult to reverse.


In McCracken County, the GLE land transfer was announced on the day before Thanksgiving, 2024. The incentive package was announced in a press release. The county's financial commitment — up to $71.9 million — is hidden behind an NDA. The proposed data center and SMR are being solicited by the DOE with no announced public input process.


The speed and secrecy of this process is not unique to Paducah. It is the operating model.


The bipartisan reality


This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about the national movement against unregulated data center development: it has no political home.


Republican Senator Chuck Hufstetler of Georgia — a deeply conservative state — led the charge to pause his state's data center tax exemptions, noting that electric customers had absorbed six rate increases in under two years. Republican county executives in North Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio have enacted local moratoriums. Conservative rural communities in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Idaho have pushed back over water rights and agricultural land loss.


At the same time, Democratic governors in Maine and New York have championed restrictions. Progressive city councils in Michigan have enacted water access moratoriums. Environmental organizations across the political spectrum have joined the opposition.


The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy — a nonpartisan research organization — compared data centers to coal mines: "taking value out and leaving harm behind." That comparison resonates in communities that have already lived the coal mine story. In Kentucky, it resonates with particular force.


This is not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue. It is a community issue. And communities are acting on it regardless of who their elected officials vote for in national elections.


The Pocatello precedent — what happened on May 14th, 2026


On May 14, 2026, more than 300 residents packed a public hearing in Pocatello, Idaho, to testify on a conditional use permit for a $2.26 billion AI data center campus on the former Hoku Materials site — a defunct industrial facility that had already left the community with its own cleanup obligations.


The parallels to Paducah are striking. Former industrial land. A foreign-backed company. Economic development promises. Community opposition.


Over 90 people gave testimony at a hearing that ran nearly four and a half hours. More than 60 spoke in opposition. Only three spoke in favor.


Four days later, Hearing Examiner Kathleen Lewis denied the conditional use permit. She overruled her own planning staff, who had recommended approval. Her grounds: the applicant had not demonstrated the project could be adequately served by public infrastructure. No water study. No wastewater analysis. No power impact assessment. No chemical discharge analysis. No site-specific environmental data.


She required all of those studies to be completed before any new application could be submitted.


The national commentary on the decision was immediate. "Pocatello should be read as a signal, not an outlier," wrote one national technology publication. "If a smaller Idaho city can turn public resistance into a formal rejection, other municipalities can follow the same path. Power is necessary — but permission is everything."


The McCracken County Planning Commission has the same authority Kathleen Lewis exercised on May 18th. The same questions she required Pocatello's applicant to answer have not been answered — and have not even been asked — for the proposed data center, SMR, and uranium enrichment development in McCracken County.


What Maine taught us — and what it got right even when it fell short


Maine's story is instructive because it shows both the power and the limits of state-level action.


Maine's legislature passed a bill placing a moratorium on data centers above 20 megawatts until November 2027. The governor vetoed it. The legislature failed to override — falling short of the two-thirds majority needed, 72-65 in the House and 20-11 in the Senate.


But the story didn't end there. Governor Mills signed a separate bill excluding data centers from Maine's business development tax incentives. She issued an executive order creating a study council to assess data center impacts. And local communities — including Bangor — enacted their own moratoriums independently.


The lesson: when state action fails, local action matters. When the governor says no to a full moratorium, local planning bodies can still act within their own jurisdiction. Maine's communities didn't wait for the state to save them. They used the authority they had.


McCracken County's Planning Commission has authority the state cannot override — the authority to require adequate environmental analysis before granting local development approvals. That authority exists regardless of what Frankfort does or doesn't do. It exists regardless of what the Governor says. It exists regardless of what the DOE's solicitation process produces.


It exists in this county, with the McCracken County Planning & Zoning Commission.


Virginia — what happens when you say yes without asking questions


Virginia is the cautionary tale that every other state is studying right now.


Data centers now consume approximately 40% of Virginia's electricity — up from less than 5% in 2010. Loudoun County alone hosts 199 operating data centers with 117 more in development. The state earns 48 cents in new revenue for every dollar it forgoes in data center tax exemptions. Residential electricity bills are projected to rise by $444 per year by 2040. The state's own auditors have described the incentive program as fundamentally broken.


Virginia is now trying to legislate its way out of a dependency it never voted on. Thirty-plus reform bills were introduced in the 2025 legislative session. Nearly all failed. The industry's lobbying infrastructure — built on the back of decades of unchallenged access — is now the primary obstacle to reform.


The communities that approved data center development in Virginia in the 2000s and 2010s did not know they were making a 40-year commitment to electricity dependency, rate increases, and foregone tax revenue. They were told they were making a 10-year economic development decision.


McCracken County has the opportunity that Virginia communities did not have — the opportunity to ask the hard questions before the commitment is locked in. The opportunity to demand the complete picture before the approvals are granted. The opportunity to be on the right side of a national reckoning that is, slowly but unmistakably, moving in one direction.


You are not alone


If you have felt isolated in this fight — if the press releases and the ribbon cuttings and the "major win for our community" headlines have made you feel like the only person who sees what we see — this is the blog post for you.


You are not alone. 69 jurisdictions have said no or not yet. Thousands of community members in Idaho, Maine, Georgia, Virginia, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio have stood up at public hearings just like the one we attended on May 27th and said the same things we are saying.


The arguments are the same because the situation is the same. Private profit. Public risk. Secret deals. Inadequate process. Communities asked to absorb costs they were never told about, for benefits that were never honestly calculated.


And increasingly, communities are winning. Pocatello won. Maine communities won at the local level even when they lost at the state level. North Carolina communities enacted moratoriums before the state legislature acted. Michigan's Ypsilanti utility authority voted unanimously to restrict water and sewer access for data centers — the first utility-based restriction in the country.


The wave is accelerating. From March to April 2026 alone, 14 new restrictions were enacted. Four moratoriums are now permanent.


This is what a national reckoning looks like at the community level. It looks like a lot of ordinary people — hunters and anglers and teachers and farmers and parents — showing up at public meetings and refusing to accept that a bad deal is inevitable just because powerful people say it is.


That is what is happening in Paducah. And it is happening everywhere.


Sources — verify everything:


 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page